The Sacred Shore (21 page)

“I am hardly that, m'sieur.”

“You will permit me to differ, mademoiselle. Your fortitude is evident to all here. You are a strong one, a pillar against which all of your family leans.”

The matter-of-fact but gentle way he expressed himself left Nicole blinking back a hot flood of tears. “I fear I have misled you. They are not my immediate family at all. Guy Belleveau is my uncle, my mother's brother.”

“If you mingle your affairs with them, they are kin,” Pastor Collins replied firmly, pushing open the mission's front door. “If you take their cares upon your heart, they are family and more.”

Instead of handing the basket back, he opened the door that connected the mission to the seminary. “Why do you not join me in our central hall for a moment? It is bound to be quiet this time of day.”

For reasons she could not understand, Nicole followed him, grateful for the opportunity to share a few minutes more with this warm-eyed pastor. “You are too kind, m'sieur.”

“Not at all. I am a lonely old gentleman who is charmed by your beauty and your strength. As are we all.” He led her down a long connecting passage of stone and narrow windows, through another door and into the communal kitchen. He set her basket on the counter, then led her through a final door and into the dining hall. Two girls at the far end were setting the tables for supper. He selected a table by the window, waiting until she was seated to lower himself into the seat across from her. “Now then. Tell me what is in your heart.”

The simple words held such a potent invitation, yet Nicole's proud nature was sorely tempted to refuse. It would have been so easy to deny there was anything at all. If she said there was nothing, he would not press. A single glance at that seamed and bearded face was enough to show that he was not a man who probed where he was not welcome. But she also knew that here was a man who did not judge, did not condemn, who would not distort what was already so confusing. The warmth in his features and his gaze seemed to draw from her the torment she had carried since the storm. And even long before that. “I am so confused,” she began slowly.

“Ah.” Nothing more. A single nod, a leaning back, a waiting. Ready for whatever it was she wished to say.

“But there is so much to tell, so many tangles, I do not know …”

“Of course, of course.” Another nod. Slower this time, taking in all his upper body. “So many of life's greatest woes are such because they do not come alone. They attack with gathered force, do they not?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

“Tell me not in order, not in place. Tell me only what you wish. And at your own pace. I am in no hurry.”

Nicole found herself thinking back to the journey down the bayou. The day she had refused Jean Dupree's request for marriage. And all the confusion seemed to leap up into her being once more, all the torment that had seemed to commence with that day. As she spoke, she found herself filled with the images of her home. The bayou waters sparkled green and soft and warm. The scents of home wafted through the stone hall. Baking bread and steaming crawfish and spices and the rich warm earth of planting. Her father's voice seemed to reach across the distance and speak to her, as though he had been waiting for just such a moment to tell her that they missed her and loved her and …

Nicole could not help but lower her head to the table and sob. A gentle hand patted her arm, then the back of her head. But nothing was said. Nothing except the one hand, letting her know more than words that she was not alone. She gathered herself as best she could, raised up and stared through the window as Pastor Collins rose and went to the basin in the opposite corner. The scene outside was washed with distortion by the leaded glass. Exactly the same as the feelings within her heart.

“Here you are, my dear.”

“Thank you.” She accepted the damp cloth and wiped her face and pressed hard against her eyes. “You must think me such a fool.”

“I think nothing of the sort. Those who are expected to be strong sometimes find themselves unable to be weak. Even when it would be better for their own health and well-being.”

Nicole found it uncanny how he seemed to know exactly what to say. She was able to set her shame aside with the cloth, take a deep breath, and confess, “I feel torn by so many different desires.”

“Yes,” he murmured, the single word an invitation to continue.

“I want to go on to Acadia. I need to. But I miss my family.” She realized she had broken down before even explaining why it was she wished to travel on. But at the moment, his understanding this was less important than her need to shape her confusion into words. Not for Pastor Collins, but for herself. “I have always wanted to travel. I have never felt fully at home in Louisiana.” A sudden thought struck her, one that rose unbidden. She tested it by forming it into words. “Perhaps that is why I have not married, because I did not want to be tied to one place and one way of life.”

She waited, almost expecting this older man of the church to tell her that this was a woman's place. Yet Pastor Collins said nothing at all, merely watched and waited.

Which allowed another thought to rise from the shadows of her own heart. “I think perhaps I was too scarred by what happened when I was young. I was just a few months old when the British expulsion began. My earliest memories are of living in places that were not our own. We traveled, we worked, we saved, we traveled on. Always looking for a land and a home of our own. Now my parents are happy in Louisiana. They are settled. My brothers as well.”

“But not you,” Pastor Collins murmured.

“I am and I am not. I want to stay and I want to go. I love my Louisiana home, and yet I still feel the call of my younger years, and all the journeying. Always that feeling that the … the place of rest is just ahead … somewhere.” She felt a new freedom with this examining of herself. “And all the mystery of what lies beyond the road's next turning. I want this—and I don't.”

The older man seemed pleased by her response. “So much of life is like that, is it not? Pulling us so hard in two opposite directions.”

“Yes.” She felt so relieved by his words, not just that he took her seriously, but that he was able to understand her meaning. “Yes, it does.”

“So hard to know which direction to take. So hard to make harmony of it all. Or of ourselves.” He cocked his head to one side, his gray eyes twinkling. “Do you feel as though this confusion reflects a conflict at the very center of yourself?”

His question seemed to peel back the layers of her heart. Nicole whispered, “Yes.”

“Oh, so do I, my dear. So do I. Often. Sometimes a conflict is there at the deepest point of my existence. So many
outside
problems seem to reflect this
inside
uncertainty—at times an anguish. And do you know what I have found?”

The simple truth of his quiet words delved with knifelike precision. Nicole wanted and yet did not want to hear what he had to say. But she nodded for him to continue.

“It seems to me that the friction and the discord spring from my very humanness. Do you ever feel that?”

She nodded once more, almost against her own will. She wanted him to stop and yet willed him to continue. The mirror he had suddenly lifted and held before her face hurt to look into. Yet it was so brilliantly clear that she could not turn away.

“Oh, so do I,” he went on. “The apostle Paul declared there was something he bore, an illness, a pain—we don't know exactly what it was—that forced him to turn to God. Day in and day out, he had to seek God because it was only with His presence that Paul could bear his burden. Do you see what this confession makes of this thorn in his flesh?”

“A gift,” she whispered, surprised that she spoke at all.

“There! I knew you were a brilliant lass. A gift! Is that not a wonder? Who else but God could take such a thorn as the conflict that stirs in my mind and heart and turn it into what keeps me
closest
to Him? It is only through God that I can choose the right path. Only through God that I can hold to peace. Only through God that I can see what is eternally right, and what is merely smoke rising from the fires of my sinfulness.” He smiled with such joy, as though he was sharing with her the labors of his lifetime. And perhaps, she realized, he was.

Pastor Collins continued, “And how is that possible? How can I achieve this transformation from confusion to calm? There is only one way I have found. And that is by choosing correctly at the very outset. By turning to God.

“Every time the doubts arise, every time I am unable to decide, every time I feel the choices are too hard to make, I must wait upon my Lord. I must fall to my knees and confess that though I am strong in some ways, I am weak in so many others. And I need Him as much where I think I am strong as where I know I am weak. It is only through His strength and His wisdom that I can see my way clear.”

For much of that day, Nicole found herself moving through the mission in dread of her next contact with the pastor. Though his words had been kind, they had also been deeply personal. It was not that he had delved where she did not wish, she finally decided, so much as that he had quietly urged
her
to do so. She was left feeling uncomfortably vulnerable. Nicole remained so quiet and removed that both Guy and Emilie asked if she was coming down with a fever.

But when Pastor Collins came searching for her, he came at such a rapid pace she had no time to duck away. He drew her to one side of the bustling commons room and announced, “I have located a ship traveling north. One with berth space for all of you.”

The confusion she had known that morning returned in full measure. “I suppose I should go speak with the others,” she answered slowly.

“That is precisely why I wanted to speak with you first,” he countered. “Perhaps it would be a good idea to settle the decision in your own mind before telling your family.”

His meaning was clear. The invitation she had found so appealing and yet also frightening was again there in his gentle features. She sighed, “I wish I knew what to do.”

“Have you prayed about this?” When she hesitated, he answered his own question with, “You find it difficult to separate a confusion over your faith from the confusion as to your journey, is that so?”

“Yes,” she sighed, relieved that he would not condemn her for this lack as well.

“Then I shall pray for you until you are able to do so yourself,” he replied, as though it was the simplest thing in the world. “Perhaps it would help me if I knew why you were traveling north.”

Again Nicole paused, then responded with, “My uncle received a letter … no, that is not it, not it at all. That is his reason. Not mine.”

He did not seem the least put out by her ambiguity, or her need once more to halt and struggle to make sense of her thoughts. Finally she decided it was not just that he deserved the truth, she wanted to tell him. “In truth, sir, my birth parents are English.”

His reaction was astonishing. The clergyman's features paled, and a deep tremor shook his portly frame. “I beg your pardon?”

“English.” She took no satisfaction in his bewilderment. “It is the truth, m'sieur, though I speak almost none of your tongue. I did not know of this until only a few weeks ago. It is a fact. My English mother offered to take an ailing French baby to an English doctor, and I was left with the French family. The plan was that it would be only for a few days. But during that time the English”—her voice faltered on the word—“drove the French from Acadia. …” She drifted to a stop and watched in alarm as the pastor reached up with one tense hand and began massaging his chest above his heart.

“Would you happen—do you know the name of the village where you were born?” he asked in obvious agitation.

“Even that is a part of the confusion,” she confessed, finding that though this good man was distressed, still she found comfort in speaking with him. “I had always thought it was a village called Minas. That was the place my French parents spoke of all my life.”

“Minas,” he repeated, the word almost a moan. “Minas.”

“All the tales of my childhood, all the comfort we found in the hardest of times, came from the stories they told of Acadia and our village of Minas.” She took a shaky breath. “But I learned this very spring when I was told of my true heritage that I was born in the neighboring English settlement of Fort Edward.”

A second hand reached up to grip his heart. “And your English parents … do you know their names?”

“Yes.” She was watching him curiously now, wondering at the man's sudden affliction. Surely he was not offended that she was in fact English—as he was himself. “A-Andrew and Catherine Harrow.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” he moaned and reached toward her with a shaky hand. “Dear, sweet Lord above.”

“What's the matter?” she cried as she felt the tremors of his hand through his grip on her arm. Shivers of uncertainty and wonder ran over her own frame.